The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online Page B

routes for the earnest Decadent were Catholicism and suicide. Religious faith is not the only ideal to which a man might commit himself in order to recover the sense of being and doing something worthwhile. Aesthetic and political creeds could both offer convenient exits for Decadents disenchanted with disenchantment, and did so; others could simply learn to look at themselves and their work more ironically, becoming self-mocking satirists.
    In exactly the same way, there were many writers contemporary with the Decadent Movement whose unwillingness to give up some such commitment, or whose inability to become entirely earnest about Decadent themes, kept them on the periphery despite the influence of the same ideas and preoccupations which attracted the Decadents to Decadence. Some of these writers warrant discussion in the context of Decadence if only to assist in the marking out of its blurred boundaries, and one or two of them produced important Decadent texts among works of other kinds.
    The Comte de Villiers d’Isle Adam, whose Contes cruels (1883) were praised by Des Esseintes in À rebours would certainly be included with the Decadents were it not for an urgent Idealism in his work which kept ennui and impuissance from his literary agenda. The conte cruel sub-genre which he pioneered, and which was subsequently taken up by writers like Maurice Level, certainly contains some Decadent items, but it is also possessed by a strong sense of irony which is much less narrowly-focused than the irony of Mendès’ work. The Decadent aristocrat Lord Ewald in Villiers’ misogynistic fantasy L’Eve Future (1886) finds an extraordinary way to transcend his predicament, when the inventor Edison builds him a perfect woman, thus taking the cult of the artificial to a new extreme. In his own art-work, Villiers could never be content for long with apathetic accidie; some of his “cruel tales” exhibit an uneasy callousness which is perfectly Decadent, but they are not typical of his outlook; he went on to develop a conscientiously neo-Romantic extravagance in such visionary dramas as the posthumously-published Axel (1890).
    Insofar as Villiers de l’Isle Adam was a Decadent at all one could argue that a Decadent consciousness which he would dearly have wished to avoid was briefly thrust upon him by circumstance. He came from an aristocratic family in dire decline and failed utterly to redeem his position by making a useful marriage; small wonder, therefore, that he was occasionally possessed by splenetic hopelessness. He was not the only writer to be thus seized against his will; Gérard de Nerval was to prove an unfortunate prototype for a group of writers who were gradually toppled into the abyss of mental disorder – usually by the ravages of syphillis. Guy de Maupassant, who was a thoroughgoing realist in the greater part of his work, became increasingly fascinated by the effects of morbid hallucination as the spirochaete disordered his senses, and some of his work of the late eighties has a paranoid intensity. The fact that he was never able to accept the literal existence of ghosts did not stop him from exploring the psychology of fear in a scrupulous and intense fashion, and his work in this vein is sometimes very close in spirit to the supernatural stories of Jean Lorrain.
    Visionary drama of the kind developed by Villiers de L’Isle Adam was also the preferred medium of the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, whose early work is very closely associated with the Decadent Movement, displaying passive characters helpless to defy the frankly mysterious forces which impel them towards their various dooms. From La Princesse Maleine (1889) to La mort de Tintagiles (1894) his work is thoroughly pessimistic, but his most famous work, L’oiseau bleu (1909; tr, as The Blue Bird ) is a much more hopeful allegory in which the power of the dreamer becomes sufficiently assertive to control and defy the threat of nightmare.
    The theatre